User blog:NightSpeakers/WAM and HDM
So, I didn't think this was appropriate for Discussions, so I wrote it in a blog! Introduction This is just going to be a blog all about the new things happening in the HDM world (the new book: The Secret Commonwealth and also the BBC TV series) and how it affects our WAM (Wiki Activity Monitor) score. WAM is an important thing with wikis, it helps users and staff register the viewing figures, contributions and generally how well the wiki is doing. You can see more information on its FAQ page. WAM is also good to help track how well our SEO is. What is WAM? Every day, FANDOM records the top 5000 communities with the highest WAM score. As I'm writing this, during the past 30 days, we've averaged at about 69 with our score, 1275 with our rank amongst other wikis and come 84th within the FANDOM books wikis. WAM and HDM Within the next year, hopefully, The Secret Commonwealth and TV series are going to come out, this means more viewers, almost definitelp:ely more contributors (well, at least more edits every week) and therefore a bigger WAM score is going to be coming. This means our wiki will become more popular, so we want this WAM score to be as big as possible in order to boost our ranking in the search engine. RailWAM A great way to see this is to track our WAM score. We can do this via an extension called RailWAM. This adds a box to the sidebar of the wiki that allows us to see extra special pages to track our WAM score over time. An admin would have to enable it globally (for all editors, like on this wiki). By looking at that, you can see if the WAM score and ranking has improved, stayed the same, or decreased since the day before. By clicking the 'Dashboard' link, it allows you to see graphs of data to see a better picture over time. To enable WAM for yourself, make sure the setting 'Enable personal Javascript' is enabled in your preferences ( ). Go to the 'Under the hood' tab and down to the very bottom in the section that says 'Advanced display options'- its the 3rd one down from the top. Tick the box and then go to and add the following to it: /*Adds RailWAM*/ window.railWAM = { logPage:"Project:WAM Log", top5000mode:"true" }; // importArticles call importArticles({ type: 'script', articles: [ 'u:dev:MediaWiki:RailWAM/code.js' ] }); Once you've purged the page (ctrl + F5 on Windows - you can see them all at w:Help:Bypass your cache) you should see the new module. This is then a great way to view and take a look at the WAM score over the past years and how it has improved. There are certain days where the WAM does not show, this is because our WAM score was so low that it didn't make the top 5000 communities. Improvement There are some very simple things that can help improve our score, many mentioned on the official WAM page. The Harry Potter Wiki has been thinking of ways to improve their WAM and therefore their community's SOE - you can see a great blog about it here and I think a lot of these points can be carried across to the HDM wiki to allow more visitors to stay and come back to this wiki. When the book and TV series come out, I reckon many people are going to read articles on the wiki because they are confused about what is happening or have forgotten who a certain character is and want to read up on them. This means we want to give them the facts immediately so they don't have to scroll down the page to see everything. The introduction and infobox are a great way to easily display information and something we need to make the most of. Suggestions Now, if you go onto that other HPW blog post I linked earlier back (this one), I think we should take into account the first to suggestions put there: reduce warnings at the top of articles and make concise introduction paragraphs. The first suggestion may seem impossible to overcome, the warnings we have at the top of articles are mostly the templates: , or . These are important of course, but mainly to editors. For viewers who just want to read through the article and the main contents, these templates are as annoying as ads. So, is there a way to make sure these templates are there but aren't annoying? We could move them to the bottom of the page, of course, but we could also use EraIcons, round buttons at the top of the page above the edit button. These can have a small image on them and a link to another page maybe explaining what it means. I.e, instead of the references template, we could instead have an EraIcon that leads to a page that explains what page with this template mean. Then the second point, to clean up the intro paragraphs and make sure it contains all the needed information and to then make sure the contents and headings of subsequent paragraphs are clear and informative. Summary So, these are the points that I think will help us increase our WAM and make sure this wiki is as good as possible. If we follow the suggestions, I hope a lot more readers will stay on the wiki for longer, return to the wiki and even recommend and advertise the wiki so that more people can see it and join in our enthusiasm for the wiki. I think the SEO ranking is also very important, this will mean more people can find our wiki in the first place. To see more about improving our SEO see this blog amongst others on Community Central. If there's anything you'd like to add or comments about what I've put above, please feel free to write a comment, it really helps! Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts